Rocket Science

Chapter Eleven

“Well, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy, slapping one hand against the pump of his shotgun. Mr. Neville sat next to him, in the same chair he’d had all evening, polishing the barrel of his pistol with one Mrs. Bellamy’s good napkins. Not that she had anything to say about it at this point.

I was flat terrified. Floyd was caught under their guns, just like me and Mrs. Bellamy, but he was trying to stay on their good side. Would he push me in the cess pit, too, to save me? Or worse? And the fact that Mr. Bellamy had finally gotten my name right after all this time was somehow all the more terrifying.

Mr. Bellamy leaned forward across the dining table. “What are we going to do with you?”

I could hear Floyd pace behind me. He still had that butcher knife. I just looked at Mr. Bellamy and shook my head.

“Is that ‘no?’” Mr. Bellamy looked at me like a roach he’d found in the flour tin. “Would that be, ‘I don’t know?’ Or maybe you’re saying ‘please don’t do anything at all to me, sir?’”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. My throat was closing up, and it was hard to talk. The headache I’d woken up with earlier was back with a vengeance. I wondered how much it would hurt when they killed me. I prayed it would be a bullet in the head, while I wasn’t looking. I didn’t want to know.

“I see,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Well, Vernon, I got some bad news and some good news for you.”

My voice had gone to empty air. I had nothing to say anyway, so I just nodded. It felt as if I was on a string.

“The bad news is, we’re gonna have to kill you.” He smiled at me, a narrow-lipped ancestral echo of Floyd’s million-dollar grin. Mr. Bellamy must have been handsome once, back before the Spanish-American War. “The good news is, we can’t kill you quite yet. You still have to figure out how to fly our airplane.”

Pegasus. Mr. Bellamy had always known about Pegasus and Floyd’s little adventures in Belgium. It made me wonder how deep their planning had gone.

“It’s too bad you didn’t serve, Vern,” said Floyd from behind me. He sounded tense. Mr. Neville glanced up at him, glaring over my head. “A quick-witted fellow can get in on all kinds of money-making deals in Europe right now. There’s desperate people over there, angry, desperate people with a lot of cash money to throw around.”

It was too bad that Floyd didn’t get himself killed in the Battle of the Bulge, I thought. My decent, hard-working brother Ricky had to go die on some jungle trail in the Pacific while a cockroach like Floyd came back in one piece, loaded with cash. I couldn’t believe I’d ever cared for the little weasel, let alone spent most of my childhood with him.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Think of it as a motivational opportunity. You do your part fast, see, figure out how to fly that airplane. Then teach Floyd what he needs to know, we’ll kill you quick. Heck,” he said expansively, “I’ll let you pick how. Shotgun to the head, whatever. We’ve even got some rat poison.”

Mr. Bellamy smiled at me, little yellowed teeth peeking out from behind pale lips like fat caterpillars crawling across his face.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “you do your part slow, stall for time, guess what happens? We kill you slow and bad, then go find ourselves another aeronautical engineer. What do you think, Floyd? How could we do it? Give young Vernon here some ideas to think about.”

He was so close behind me I could feel his breath on top of my head. I imagined that butcher knife in his hand, twitching toward the back of my neck, aching to cut into my spine, slicing my throat the hard way — back-to-front.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” Floyd said. His voice was strong again, back under control in the presence of his father and Mr. Neville. But what he’d said in the outhouse… he didn’t believe in this… craziness. Floyd, who’d carried me when I couldn’t walk as a kid. “I don’t reckon Vern will be any kind of problem.” His fingers settled firm upon my shoulder. Was this my oldest friend talking? Or the surprising lunatic who’d come back from Europe? “He knows what’s good for him.”

Mr. Neville set down the napkin. “Kneecaps are good. While’s he’s sitting down, a bullet right from above. Blows the calf away. Cuff his hands, dump him in the slit trench before you fill it in, let him decide whether to drown in shit, suffocate under the dirt or just bleed out.”

“Uh,” gasped Floyd behind me, like he’d been sucker punched. His mother was out in that trench. But he was behind me, with a knife, instead of helping somehow.

I couldn’t do much about Mr. Bellamy or Mr. Neville — justice for them would come from somewhere else. But right then I decided I would kill Floyd if I had to tear his liver out with my bare hands. If Floyd lived out a long life in Kansas while me and Dad and my brother Ricky and who knows how many others rotted in the fertile ground, then there was no goodness in the world at all.

My hate must have showed in my eyes like a harvest burn-off because Mr. Bellamy stirred in his chair, his hand stroking the pump of the shotgun. “Floyd, I do believe Vernon’s showing some signs of commitment here.”

That irritated me. I hawked and spat on the table, then bit my lip. I might as well try to understand it all, if I was going to die for it. Start at the top, with what was most important. “What did you do to my dad? Why?”

Mr. Bellamy looked surprised. “Nothing. I know there was trouble, but that wasn’t our doing.”

“Aren’t you Nazis?”

Mr. Bellamy laughed, exchanging grins with Mr. Neville. “Us? Nazis? Boy, you’re crazy. I’ve been a Republican for sixty-eight years. Why in blazing hell would I want to be a Nazi?”

“Nah,” said Floyd behind me, his voice solid again, “there’s Nazis out there, all right. That’s why Mr. Neville is here, and the boys on the roof. But we ain’t the Nazis.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Oh, take your pick. I don’t rightly know for certain,” said Mr. Bellamy conversationally. He shouldered his shotgun, sighting along the barrel toward my face. “Probably Sheriff Hauptmann. He always was a fascist sympathizer, ever since he came home from Russia. Definitely one of those Captain Markowicz fellows is a Nazi. Heck, maybe both of them are. Doesn’t matter much. Their day is done, but the corpse ain’t quit kicking yet.”

“And I’ll bet there’s one in the public library,” I said bitterly, thinking of Mrs. Sigurdsen.

“I expect you’d be surprised,” said Floyd behind me. “About who’s who in Butler County, I mean.”

“Yep,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Know what your dad did in the Great War?”

“Yes.” I’d heard the stories, in and out of drink. They changed from time to time, but the substance was always the same. “He fought in the trenches with Pershing in France.”

“Nope.” Mr. Bellamy broke open the shotgun and checked the shells. “He killed Germans and Hungarians on the Eastern Front. With me and Doc Milliken. Only, Milliken wasn’t a doctor back then. Just a guy who was real good with a knife.” He paused reflectively. “Of course, that kind of follows on I guess. Me, I broke necks. Sometimes kneecaps and elbows.”

“Dad,” I whispered.

What else hadn’t my father told me? Everybody had his secrets, that was a fact of life. Today, at the age of twenty-three, probably breathing my last, I realized that I had never known anything about the sad old drunk who was my father.

“Grady was a good man,” said Mr. Bellamy. “I’m right sorry he got mixed up in this. I reckon they was trying to frame you up.”

Was, he’d said. Thinking about Dad brought me close to tears. My old man had to be dead as a doornail by now, and I was going to die soon myself, one way or the other. But if I kept Mr. Bellamy talking I might learn something I could use. Maybe Pegasus could find a way to get a message out, if I got enough information to feed it to the computational rocket before these madmen killed me.

It was time to change the subject. I had always thought Mr. Bellamy was an ineffectual old man living on his memories. Now he was behaving more like Al Capone. If nothing else, he was a heck of an actor. “How did you get involved in all this?” I asked.

“The Eastern Front collapsed in 1917,” said Mr. Bellamy. “We Kansas boys was working for the British Army, on a special little project that our own country wouldn’t have a part of.”

“Kind of like Roger’s Rangers,” said Floyd, still behind me.

I was beginning to understand how he might have been drawn in — hero stuff was always interesting to Floyd, like real life comic books, even if he didn’t want to do the hard, dirty work that went along with it. At least not til the war had pulled him in.

“Shut up, boy,” said Mr. Bellamy. “This is my story, and I’ll tell it.”

He looked me over carefully, the same weighing up Mr. Neville had given me earlier. That seemed strange, given that Mr. Bellamy had known me almost all my life. I was an open book. What was left for him to judge?

“Your Daddy and me and Doc Milliken were in the Kansas Militia, back before the Great War, playing hard boys to make ourselves feel good. Then that fight started up in Europe and President Wilson tried to keep this country out of it. But there were lads like us that wanted in on the action. We’d grown up on stories of the Mexican War and Civil War, watched the Spanish War go by without us. We were already hitting thirty, and feared we wouldn’t make it in. This was our turn.

“Anyway, there were American pilots flying for the French, and American boys fighting for the English. The British Army came out this way, looking for strong, able men for a special project. They signed us up, taught us stuff they learned in the Boer War, stuff they couldn’t teach their own boys for fear of the newspaper publicity.”

“I’ve heard of the Boer War.”

“We were eager to go,” Mr. Bellamy continued, as if I hadn’t said a word. He seemed to be slipping back in his own mind. “Doc Grainger was still alive then, and Milliken hadn’t finished school yet. We wound up killing Germans for the Russians on the Eastern Front. We did a good job, until the Russians sold out to the Germans in ’17. We got interned, in a camp at the mouth of the Pechora River, where it flows into the Barents Sea. It was cold as hell, nothing to eat but ice, snow and rifle butts.”

Somehow, this story was coming full circle to Pegasus and its tomb in the Arctic ice.

“One thing lead to another, and eventually we was let go. We just stood there on that frozen beach in front of the gates of our camp, not knowing where to turn. We all made it home by different routes. Doc Milliken got rescued by a British unit fighting for the Whites outside of St. Petersburg. Your dad stowed away on a freighter from Arkhangelsk to Iceland.”

He laughed, still deep in memory, his voice chilly and bitter.

“None of us came home the same. Not me, not the Doc, not Grady. I made my own choices, got into the shine business later on after the Volstead Act. Doc Milliken, he hooked up with Hauptmann and some of the other German sympathizers around here. Bunch of closet fascists, those boys and girls. Sheriff’s Department’s still full of them. Your dad, he just pretended it never happened. Came back to that boy Ricky and your mother and made up stories about the Western Front.”

I had never known any of this about Dad. He had always said he was a doughboy in France. I wished he were still alive to talk to about this. I wished I was going to stay alive long enough to talk to him about anything. I glanced up at Mr. Bellamy. He was looking at me, expecting a reply.

“What happened to you?”

His voice was barely a whisper. “The Cheka picked me up, kept me for another year or so.”

“Cheka?” I asked.

“Dzerzhinsky’s secret police. Lenin’s hit men. They call it the NKVD now. Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del.” The Russian words rattled off his tongue like he’d been born to the language. “People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.” Mr. Bellamy sighed, looking sad. “I didn’t come home until 1920. Mrs. Bellamy had Floyd almost seven months later. Fine, strapping nine pound baby boy.”

I was so busy thinking about the NKVD that I almost missed what Mr. Bellamy said about Floyd. Floyd didn’t. Behind me, he gasped.

“You mean you and Mama…?” Floyd asked. His voice trailed off. I wondered exactly how could a fellow ask his father what Floyd was thinking.

“It don’t matter now.” Mr. Bellamy looked angry. No wonder he’d been willing to lock her up, then dump her in the cess pit. I was sure he hadn’t meant to say this much, but I had started him talking and he’d just gone on.

I couldn’t figure whether or not I was surprised that Mr. Neville hadn’t reacted to anything Mr. Bellamy had said. He obviously knew the whole story. I was trying to sort through what Mr. Bellamy had told me, ignoring how Dad’s untold history made me feel as I puzzled through the facts. I didn’t have much time left — Mr. Bellamy had made it quite clear he planned to kill me. Was there some angle here? I had vaguely known of the NKVD. Like he said, the Reds’ secret police. Stalin’s thugs, these days.

“Who’s my daddy?” demanded Floyd.

“Shut up, boy.” Mr. Bellamy laid the shotgun back on the table and clenched his fists. Mr. Neville shifted his grip on the pistol, waiting to see where this would go next. I wanted to sink into the floor, vanish without a trace. For all that they’d turned out to be monsters, I couldn’t help but care about the Bellamys — they’d been like family to me all my life.

And I was even understanding how they became monsters. I hated myself for sympathizing with Mr. Bellamy.

“I stood in the hallway upstairs and listened to her scream while she bore you,” he said with a snarl. “I raised you from a pup.” He stood up, his voice rising in volume. “I taught you how to run and fight and shoot, taught you about women, sent you off to the war and waited for you to come home. I’m your Daddy, by God, and you will show me the respect that I deserve.”

Mr. Bellamy grabbed the shotgun and pointed it over my head. I watched in fascinated horror as he pumped the action. I didn’t dare turn around to look at Floyd. I was too afraid of the gun.

Mr. Neville lifted his pistol, wavering it between Mr. Bellamy and Floyd somewhere behind me. “You going to be all right, Alonzo?” he asked.

“Get on out of here, Marvin,” growled Mr. Bellamy. “This here’s family business.”

Mr. Neville glanced at me with another of his rare, small smiles. He slipped the pistol back in its holster, nodded at the three of us, and walked toward the kitchen. “Don’t do anything hasty, Alonzo,” he called as he left.

The back door slammed a moment later. I hoped he was going to fish Mrs. Bellamy out of the cess pit, but Mr. Neville didn’t seem to be the public-spirited type.

In front of me, Mr. Bellamy was breathing hard. Even with his recent miraculous recovery, I could hear his lungs wheeze. He was old, too old to have gone to the Great War and been broken on a Russian beach. Behind me, the floorboards creaked as Floyd shifted his weight. There was the soft rustling of his shirtsleeves rubbing against his chest as he moved his arms. Was he getting ready to fight? Was it better or worse for me if they fought? I had no idea, so I kept my mouth shut. This was no business of mine, but I was stuck in the middle of it. Literally.

“You made me hurt Mama,” said Floyd. His voice was low and painful. I’d never heard Floyd sound so honest in my life. His emotions served him, not the other way around. “Lock her up, then dump her out there.”

“She was writing out a note to Hauptmann,” answered Mr. Bellamy in the same low, painful voice. He seemed to be picking his words with care. “You know that, boy. You caught her at it. Then Marvin didn’t give us no choice. He nearly made us kill her. It would have been you next, Floyd. And you’ve always been loyal to me. Those Reds are hard bastards.”

Why was she trying to contact Sheriff Hauptmann? I thought he was a Nazi agent. Of course, Mrs. Bellamy might not have known that. And he was still the Sheriff, Nazi or not, with an interest in chasing Reds. Either way, I didn’t dare ask.

Floyd coughed, maybe choking back a sob. I wished like crazy I could see his face. “You said we had to get her out of the way. You made me hustle her out there when Ollie came, to stand in that filth. You always hated her. Now I know why.”

Good boy, Floyd, I thought, slumping down in my chair. Remember who you are.

“Floyd.” Mr. Bellamy’s voice had gone very, very flat. The pain was gone, replaced perhaps by determination. Both of them stank now, sharp sweat filling the air of the dining room. The shotgun hadn’t wavered. I sank further into my chair and thought of Floyd’s boast about his father’s marksmanship.

“Yes, sir?” Floyd said.

“This is a mighty poor time to be fighting about this. We’re neither of us gonna say another word about your mother. She’ll get cleaned up and put safely back in the root cellar now that Ollie’s gone. What’s done is done.”

“That’s fine with me. So why don’t you put down the shotgun… Daddy?”

Without breaking eye contact with Floyd, Mr. Bellamy slowly reached down to placed the weapon on the dining table. As he did it, Floyd walked around to my left and sat down at the other end of the table. His face was set as hard as his father’s. The two of them stared at each other, then they both looked at me almost in the same glance. Sweating myself, I wondered where Floyd had put the carving knife. Even though he was in front of me, my neck itched.

“What do you think, Vernon?” asked Mr. Bellamy.

I was afraid to answer that question. “About what?” I asked cautiously.

His eyes narrowed. “My little story.”

I searched for a reply that wouldn’t agitate him, trying to stay away from Mrs. Bellamy, and the question of my own fate. “Are you a Communist?”

I almost bit my tongue in frustration. That might have been the stupidest question I could have asked.

Mr. Bellamy just looked at me, his eyes growing wider. For a moment, I thought he was going to laugh.

“Me?” he said. “A Communist. Boy, you are out of your mind. First you think I’m a Nazi, now you think I’m a Red. Heck, boy, I already told you. I’m a Republican.”

“But, the Cheka…”

“You’ve never been in prison, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy. His face fell back into sadness. “Things happen to a fellow in prison, on purpose sometimes, just part of life sometimes. Some of those things are, well, kind of permanent. They don’t all leave scars on the outside, if you know what I mean. Even now days, I got to do things for some people sometimes, when they ask. Got no choice, but that don’t signify I agree with them. It’s like back in the Prohibition when me and the boys were involved in the shine business. There was some Italians out of Chicago and Kansas City we had dealings with.”

I nodded. I had a pretty good idea who he was talking about.

“Well, we took their money, and we did some of what they said. That didn’t make us part of their thing, and didn’t mean we agreed with everything they did. That’s kind of how it is with me and the Russkies.”

So he did take Red money, and do their bidding. At least, that’s what I thought Mr. Bellamy meant. I couldn’t imagine what the Russians would want with a spy in Butler County, Kansas. As far as I knew, agricultural information like crop yields was a matter of public record. And back in 1920 when he came home, no one could have know how much Wichita was going to be a part of the modern aircraft industry.

“So you’re going to sell the thing in the barn to the Russians,” I said. “That’s why you haven’t turned it over to Floyd’s German friends.”

“Russians?” Mr. Bellamy chuckled. I seemed to be the funniest guy he’d met in a while. He glanced around, apparently looking to see if Mr. Neville was listening at the door, then leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Heck, no. They’re no better than the Nazis, worse in a lot of ways. Whole country full of angry, stupid people with nothing better to do than kill each other over what was said or done years earlier. No sir, Germany’s dead and America’s got the atom bomb. It ain’t gonna be long before them Russians are down, too.”

I was utterly baffled. Floyd was a Nazi agent, or at least a Nazi patsy. Mr. Bellamy, his father, was in the control of Communists if not an actual agent. What the heck were they going to do with Pegasus? Turn it over to the Republican Party?

“Don’t look so puzzled, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy gently. “It all makes sense.”

Floyd smiled, tentatively. “We worked it out so everyone gets out of this in one piece.” He frowned at me. I swear there was a tear standing in his eye. That boy sure could act. Or was he trying to tell me something? Could he save me from his dad? More to the point, from Mr. Neville?

Frustrated, I said, “What the heck is going on around here?”

Floyd’s smile came back full force, his million-dollar grin. This was the old Floyd, my Floyd, who could talk his way in and out of girl’s skirts without ruffling a feather along the way. “Them Italians are coming. Charles Binaggio from the DiGiovanni family. Kansas City mob. They’ll take delivery of that item in the barn. We’ll set things up so it looks like we got ambushed, Binaggio pays us off under the table, and good old American boys get to keep that Nazi warbird. No Germans, no Russians, and sure as heck no God damned United States Army Air Force are going to lay hands on my airplane.”

The Mafia. Organized crime. Al Capone. The Bellamys and their gang were going to sell my computational rocket to the criminal underworld.

I couldn’t believe it.

“You guys are totally off your nuts,” I said. “You can’t be serious about any of this. You’re trying to play the Germans and the Russians and the US Army CID off against each other. You’re ready to kill me like I was a rat, you’re pissing off the Sheriff and the Police Department, and the whole time you’ve got the scientific find of the century in your barn. How are you going to get away with this? All those guys aren’t going to just walk away out there. They play rougher than you do.”

“Mexico,” said Floyd. “We’re going to take our cash and live in Mexico.”

“Mexico. Do you know how far Mexico is from Kansas?”

“Not far when we’re flying in that Nazi airplane,” said Mr. Bellamy.

As if the entire Bellamy gang could fit inside Pegasus. This bunch of old men was at least as crazy as they were tough.

“I’m supposed to be dead before then,” I said bitterly. “Once I’ve taught Floyd to fly it. Besides, I thought the Italians were taking it.”

“Help us out and we can make it worth your while. Fly us to Mexico, fly the Italians back to Kansas City, and we’ll make it easy on you,” said Mr. Bellamy.

“What an incentive — a clean death in some abandoned warehouse by the Missouri River.”

“It could be worse,” said Mr. Bellamy. “Those eye-ties are a lot more inventive than even Mr. Neville. We could put in a good word for you.”

Maybe I could crash the plane. Mr. Bellamy didn’t know much about flying. I’d guess Floyd didn’t either, even after three years in the Air Corps. He was impervious to detailed knowledge — I knew that from high school. The two of them seemed to think they could strap me into the pilot’s seat, stick a gun in my ear and make me go where they wanted.

Like sticking up a taxi cab.

Mr. Bellamy grabbed his shotgun. Floyd tensed and shifted his weight. I thought about that carving knife. “Son,” said Mr. Bellamy, “take Vernon down to the barn. It’s time to quit jawboning and figure out how to get that bird off the ground. Keep a close eye on him. Do not under any circumstances let him take that airplane out to where he could try to take off.”

“What are you going to do?” Floyd asked, suspicious.

“I’m going to explain to Mr. Neville what our little ruckus was about, so he and the boys don’t get nervous. Then I’m going to clean up your mother, and wait on the porch for Roanoke Joe and Vinnie the Snake to show up. They’re on their way here from Kansas City to inspect the merchandise and set up the transaction.”

I was feeling reckless. I didn’t have much left to lose. “What if the other bad guys show up?”

“I don’t recall as how I was speaking to you, Vernon,” said Mr. Bellamy, “but we’ll take care of that in its own time. You do your job, fast, and everything else will work out.”

Floyd produced the knife from the back of his belt and waved me toward the kitchen through Mrs. Bellamy’s shotgun-blasted door. Walking to the back door and looking out the screen, I could see the moon had risen. In the silvered light, the outhouse seemed to glow, its door standing open.

Who had it been, I wondered? Who was Floyd’s Daddy? It sure as heck wasn’t Mr. Bellamy.

“Get moving, Vern,” Floyd whispered in my ear. He prodded me in the back with the knife. I could feel a sting, long and thin like from a willow whip.

“Damn, that hurts,” I whispered back. “Lay off the knife or you’re not getting anything. You can’t threaten me any further, just tick me off more.”

“Move. Please. They’re watching both of us.”

It was the ‘please’ which decided me. I moved. I remembered what Pegasus had told me about taking off from inside the barn. And I remembered that I had promised Floyd a messy death. I just wasn’t sure if I’d meant that or not.